When we are young, we are not very familiar with death. But sooner or later it enters our territory of imagined invincibility. It’s such a shock when it happens. Death is an inevitability among the elderly. For the rest of us, it feels like an injustice! My first real experience with it was when I lost my good friend the Scarabee. We were in our late twenties at the time. The Scarabee lived a reckless life and suffered numerous scrapes before his life was finally, finally, taken from him. The statement of his funeral that has survived…
When we are young, we are not very familiar with death. But sooner or later it enters our territory of imagined invincibility.
It’s such a shock when it happens. Death is an inevitability among the elderly. For the rest of us, it feels like an injustice!
My first real experience with it was when I lost my good friend the Scarabee. We were in our late twenties at the time.
The Scarabee lived a reckless life and suffered numerous scrapes before his life was finally, finally, taken from him.
The statement of his funeral that has stayed with me all my life came from his brother, who expressed his gratitude.
“We have four bonus years,” he said.
The Scarab had once nearly died from recklessness. He recovered from that incident to some degree and then lived those four bonus years before deciding to call things off.
It was rather magnanimous of his brother to be thankful for the bonus years, rather than regret the decades lost due to his early passing.
But ever since that painful yet enlightening eulogy, I’ve come to realize that death is about the end of a life. It is not an event in itself.
And so, while it’s a timeless cliche that we should “make the most of life,” I believe we should also be aware of the bonus years we get every now and then, and make the most of those bonus years too.
We may not all be as reckless as the noble Scarab, my old buddy from surfing and jolly days, but we’ve also got some bonus years. I think we have to live those years accordingly.
This Covid thing got pretty real at some point, as you’ll remember. It was an existential threat, and we can agree that a year ago we all came to terms with the fact that we are no longer being promised life.
A while ago, some of us may have developed some serious respiratory symptoms. There may have been one or two near misses when a person at work contracted the virus. We may have even lost some of the people we were in close contact with.
Do you remember that feeling from a year ago? “But I just texted them yesterday! And now they’re gone?”
That might as well have been us.
You and I, like my friend the legendary Scarab, we got some bonus years.
We’ve had some close calls. Not by reckless living, but by a global pandemic† Also economic hardship, god knows. Now there is also a world war going on, and darn it, it will probably bring even more close calls.
So please…
In six months, someone close to you will be able to give your eulogy. They may well notice that your friends and family got a bonus year or two after that, when you could have easily been lost to the world.
THESE are those bonus years. Every day, lately, we wake up with a bonus day. Please let’s make the most of these days!
Let’s live. Whatever that means to you, let’s live!